Book Review: All Necessary Force by Brad Taylor

When we left Pike and Jennifer in Taylor’s first book, One Rough Man, Pike was wondering whether Jennifer could ever have what it takes to become a true “meat eater,” somebody capable of killing when the job requires it. Jennifer, on the other hand, was wondering whether she could ever forgive Pike for being a meat eater. We find the answer to both questions in All Necessary Force. When I reviewed Taylor’s first book I said it is “one terrific book.” So what’s better than terrific? Terrificker? Whatever it is, that’s the adjective I need to use for this review of All Necessary Force. Taylor is raising the bar on himself, and I can’t wait to see his next book, to see if I’ll still be standing when I finish reading it.

In All Necessary Force, Pike and his partner Jennifer are, by the process of elimination, the two people left to find and stop a terrorist action that is all-too-possible and all-too-plausible. I stay abreast of Special Ops as much as I can from an armchair perspective, yet I learned a lot from this book, some of which I’d rather have not learned. Such as the risk that the USA, and just about any other advanced country, has of coming to a standstill. Literally. All done with a few not-too-difficult to obtain and relatively simple to operate devices that, with proper training and tactical decisions, along with determination, could bring the USA to a dead stop in a matter of hours, and that would take months or even years to solve and overcome.

In my review of Taylor’s first book, One Rough Man, I whined about the slow start and some excess verbiage that I felt could be trimmed. I take it all back for Taylor’s second book. All Necessary Force starts with action and ends with the same. And the pages in between? Ditto. Action, more action, and still more action. Overall a spellbinding, interesting, exciting, plausible and likely tale. So much so that you may want to have a cardiologist and defibrillator close by. This is true heart-stopping action.

To slow your heart down a little while raising your blood pressure, Taylor also includes plenty of political dithering, posturing and flat out BS that typically goes on when political correctness and saving-one’s-own-skin come into the equation. And realistically, is there one, just one, politician out there who’s concerned with anyone’s heinie but his own?

If you like true-to-life, authentic action books, you won’t find a better writer than Brad Taylor. And it’s all ripped from today’s headlines as the Taskforce follows the clues to Egypt and back. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.